Steven Spielberg stole the plot from Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1954 film Rear Window for last year's Disturbia, a lawsuit has claimed.

Dreamworks, its parent company Viacom Inc, and Universal Pictures are accused of infringing the rights of the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust who own the rights to the story Hitchcock's original film was based on.

Spielberg, a Dreamworks founder, is named as a defendant. According to the lawsuit, Disturbia, which grossed about $80 million at the US box office, and Rear Window are "essentially the same" story. Both are murder mysteries beginning with a man who, while peering from his window, witnesses strange behaviour in the home of his neighbour.

Hitchcock's film was based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich called Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint, which the director and actor James Stewart obtained the film rights to in 1953.

Sheldon Abend, a Hollywood producer who re-made Rear Window for TV, bought the rights to the short story in 1971 and obtained "exclusive right to adapt or copy" the story in 1991, it is claimed. Abend died in 2003 but the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust filed the lawsuit in New York last week because it claims the makers of Disturbia did not obtain the rights to the story before remaking the Hitchcock classic.

The trust complain of copyright infringement and breach of contract. The lawsuit said: "What the defendants have been unwilling to do openly, legitimately and legally, (they) have done surreptitiously, by their back-door use of the Rear Window story without paying compensation. "In the Disturbia film the defendants purposefully employed immaterial variations or transparent rephrasing to produce essentially the same story as the Rear Window story."

A spokesman for Spielberg declined to comment. Representatives of Viacom and NBC Universal were not immediately available for comment